4.2 – TessMark (OpenGL 4)

Hardware tessellation is one of the big features of Direct3D 11 and OpenGL 4 capable graphics cards. TessMark is a new benchmark focused only on the tessellation engine of DX11 class cards. It’s a pure tessellation benchmark, it does not contain complex shader or other heavy texture fetches. TessMark shows an overview of the tessellation engine raw power, that’s all. DX11 specifies that the tessellation factor can vary from 1.0 up tp 64.0. Of course, for tessellation factors like 32 or 64, most of the tessellated triangles are smaller than… a pixel. In those cases, tessellation is useless and in a real world application such as a game, high tessellation factors won’t be used. But in the case of a synthetic benchmark, it’s always instructive to see how cards can handle the whole range of tessellation level.

4.3 – ShaderToyMark (OpenGL 2)

ShaderToyMark 0.3.0 is an OpenGL 2 benchmark, developed with GeeXLab, and focused on pixel shaders only. The pixel shaders are heavily based on math (few texture fetches) and then ShaderToyMark can be seen as a kind of GPU computing benchmark.